Samsung's relationship with Apple seemingly became even more strained on Friday as the company claimed that the Cupertino company's iPhone and iPad devices infringe on five of its patents. The increasingly bitter feud also presents an even bigger conundrum as Apple is one of the Korean electronics maker's biggest component customers.

While Apple filed its lawsuit last Friday in US court, Samsung has not as of yet countersued the company here. Instead, its retaliatory suits were filed in three international markets, including South Korea, Japan and Germany. According to reports, the technologies covered include that for transmission optimization and power conservation during use of HSPA technologies, WCDMA data transmission error reduction techniques, and PC tethering.

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After a year and a half on the market, more than 350 million Windows 7 licenses have been sold, and Microsoft on Friday has claimed Windows 7 to be the "fastest selling Operating System in history."

Windows 7 launched with power in October 2009 and appears to have actually picked up momentum this year. Market analysts at NPD estimated Windows 7 launch sales were 234% higher than Windows Vista; and by September 2010, just short of a year after launch, Microsoft said 175 million licenses had been sold.

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The security community deals with disturbing news all the time, but none so disturbing as the reports that the son of Eugene Kaspersky, founder and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, has been kidnapped (and now reportedly freed). Russia is a tough place.

The Western stereotype of a Russian businessman is a politically-connected tyrant who probably only got his business through corrupt means. Not Yevgeny "Eugene" Kaspersky; I don't really know much about how he built his business, but I do know that his company has developed high-quality, respected security products that sell really well in the West. He's a genuine engineer, who worked on his own products until the company got too big for that to make sense. You can't do that by bribing public officials.

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As the outage of Sony's PlayStation Network entered into a third day without any end in sight -- and some reports indicate a cyberattack may be at fault -- at least one group is making sure that it is not blamed for the problem: Anonymous.

The group said that the mishap was due to internal issues with Sony's own servers, and those fingering Anonymous were "taking advantage of Anonymous' previous ill-will towards the company." A message to the company's PlayStation blog in Europe had said that Sony was investigating "the possibility of targeted behavior by an outside party," but since had been removed.

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The 20-year-old son of Kaspersky Lab founders Natalia and Eugene Kaspersky, who was reportedly being held for 3 million Euro ransom by kidnappers in Moscow, may have been released on Friday.

Kaspersky Lab issued an official statement which neither confrimed nor denied the reports of Ivan Kaspersky's kidnapping, and rather gently asked the media to hold back on its speculation, and not to report on rumors and allegations.

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Courtesy of our colleagues at Softwarecrew, on Wednesday we posted a story about Dropbox terms of services changes that came as a surprise, if for no other reason than the service's earlier assertions that employees couldn't access subscribers' files nor anyone not authorized by the user. Suddenly that's changed, with Dropbox stating it will open your stuff to law enforcement. I put a poll in the story, and we asked your reaction to the changes. The results are in, and you're not happy.

"This is why you can't trust cloud anything when it comes to data privacy," writes commenter LurkerLito. "If it goes to the cloud you need to encrypt it yourself with your own trusted encryption program. No matter how much people assure you that their stuff is only accessible by you because of their encryption, that is never really true unless you encrypt it with your own tools."

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Some malware infections are straightforward. They're known threats, cause little damage, and your regular antivirus engine can detect and remove them in seconds: easy. Other situations can be a little more complicated, though. Maybe you've run into a brand new threat that your security package doesn't recognize. Some malware will hijack Windows settings, perhaps disabling Task Manager or the Registry editor. Solving an issue like this may require some specialist help from a tool like Hijack Hunter.

Just launch this handy free portable utility, click "Scan," and it'll crawl all over your system looking for anything that might be suspicious. There are no signatures involved here, the program is purely highlighting items that seem interesting or out of the ordinary (which is why it might be able to pick up even previously undiscovered threats).

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Virtualization has become so popular that it is even available as an integrated option in Windows 7. Many people prefer to turn to a dedicated virtualization tool, however, and VirtualBox has proved to be one of the most popular and impressively powerful programs available. Version 4.0.6 of the app has been released, bringing with it a sizeable list of bug fixes.

There have been major improvements in the stability of the app, helping to provide a far more user-friendly virtualization experience. Memory leaks have also been plugged, and the option to store snapshots in the same directory as virtual machines has been added.

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Software company Ashampoo has been forced to issue a warning to customers after one of its servers was hacked. While no financial or credit-card information was taken, Ashampoo is keen to stress this information was not held on this server, hackers are believed to have obtained names and email addresses.

Ashampoo is warning that affected customers could be targeted by emails containing malware payloads, such as a bogus order confirmation email containing an attachment or link to a spoofed website. As the company says in its statement, "It is always important that you stay suspicious of unknown senders and that you do not respond to requests that tell you to open attachments."

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Russian media, including the Moscow Times have been posting reports that the son of Yvegny Kaspersky, head of leading international data security firm Kaspersky Lab, has been kidnapped.

At about 4pm EST on Thursday, the Russian government's daily paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta published a report which said local law enforcement had confirmed the kidnapping of 20 year old Ivan Kaspersky.

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Today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dropped the human resources equivalent of an atomic bomb on Redmond, Wash. The company will change how employees are reviewed and compensated. The changes are effective during September evaluations and will put more emphasis on cash compensation rather than stock rewards and simplify criteria used to evaluate performance. The changes reaffirm my renewed confidence in Ballmer, something I blogged about just three days ago (not that most anonymous commenters to the Mini-Microsoft blog agree).

For years, I've heard Microsoft employees moan about the convoluted evaluation process, which often puts them at the mercy of middle managers more interested in keeping their jobs than doing right by the company. The changes could fix some of the middle manager mayhem and prevent poaching from the likes of Amazon, Facebook or Google. But the devil is in the details, as they say.

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Google on Thursday launched a beta of Google Offers, an online coupon site in the vein of Groupon and LivingSocial. The move had been widely expected since January, when reports first surfaced of the Mountain View, Calif. company's plans.

Like its competitors, the service aims to give users 50 percent off or more from participating local businesses. While the company is officially launching in Portland, Ore. first, the page offers the option to sign up for deals across New York City and San Francisco as well.

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While Nintendo may be gearing up to introduce the next-generation Wii as early as late 2012, it may have quite a bit of lead time on its competitors. Gaming site Kotaku says sources have told it that neither Microsoft nor Sony has plans to launch new consoles until as late as 2014.

If the companies do indeed follow these rumored plans, at that time the Xbox 360 would have had a life cycle of nine years, and the PlayStation 3 eight. It would be about twice as long as the traditional life cycle for a gaming console, which is typically around five years.

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CyberLink has released the latest version of its do-everything media player, PowerDVD 11, which the company now boasts will "play any media format, from any source." This starts with support for playing all the main video formats, now including MKV (H.264), FLV (H.264), WTV, 3GP and 3G2 files. The program can also play your music files, though, and this version adds support for playing photos in slideshows, too.

If the content isn't on your hard drive, then PowerDVD 11 adds new support for streaming files from DLNA servers. It's able to access files on Apple and Android devices, and enhanced social media tools mean you're able to able to access YouTube videos, Facebook and Flickr images, all from within the program.

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A partial failure of Amazon's cloud server network brought down the websites of several popular services, including Quora, Reddit and Foursquare for several hours beginning around 4:41am Eastern Time Thursday. The issues were isolated to the company's data centers in Northern Virginia.

Amazon's AWS status page indicated that as of press time Thursday afternoon on the East Coast, issues were still ongoing, including "instance connectivity, latency and error rates." According to the company, the issue began when a unspecified "networking event" caused AWS servers to erroneously re-mirror a large amount of data.

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